The One Where Tesla Gets A Television
by fascinationgame
Summary: A story in which Tesla goes to the human world on a supply run. He has no idea why he brings back a television or what he's going to do with it - or if it will even work in Hueco Mundo. [Or: Tesla and Nnoitra sit around watching cheesy horror films.]
1. Chapter 1

Plot idea prompted by tumblr user teslalindocruz and used with his permission. ;)

* * *

The human world is strange and loud and crowded. People talk constantly and crush together in waves on the streets. There's so little room that everything is built up, up, up, and Tesla finds himself small and lost beneath buildings that stretch into the heavens. Every time he looks up he feels faintly galled by their enormity, like they're only there to challenge him. There is a distinct temptation to release his resurreccion, which is - irrational.

The air is thinner here, even though it carries thousands more smells. There's not enough reishi in it. No wonder the humans are all weak and soft and strange. This air would make a hollow weak and soft and strange, too, if he lived in it. It just makes Tesla feel faintly ill and a little bit dizzy.

He twitches at the blinking neon glow from a nearby sign. There are harmless lights in every window, on the vehicles and even in people's hands. Every flash he catches from his peripheral vision reminds Tesla, uneasily, of a cero.

He can sort of see why it's him who's out here, feeling the sickly burn of the sun beating down upon his head. (It rises up from the cement beneath his boots, too. The human world is hot.)

Of all the arrancar capable of passing for human, Tesla is by far the least volatile. Certainly most of the espada would be unsuited to this sort of task... if it weren't already beneath them. Which it is, he reminds himself - although he really doubts their ability to get it done, too. Many of them are... high strung, and easily distracted.

Tesla is not high strung. Tesla is steady and disciplined and, given how unpleasant the human world is, he has decided to take this mission as a kind of backhanded compliment.

That doesn't change the part where he is still completely lost, of course.

"Um... excuse me," says a human, and it takes Tesla an awkward half second to realise he's being addressed. It's just really hard to tell because their reiatsu is negligible and he feels like none of them are real. It's like being surrounded by people made of cotton fluff.

But Tesla is in a gigai, because a gigai is necessary for interaction, and that means people can see him.

Yes. Of course.

"Yes," says Tesla stiffly, turning to it.

It is... short. And wearing a soft hat and a bag with charms dangling from it. One of the charms is a tiny pink pig with wings, which he considers... remarkably unlikely to occur in nature.

"You look a bit lost," says the human uncertainly. He can see it is trying to avoid looking at his eye patch, although he can't tell why. It's eyes linger on the fragment of his mask. "Do you need help?"

Tesla blinks once, slowly. That seems strangely helpful, and therefore suspect. Its reiatsu is really negligible though, and it can't hope to hurt him. He hesitates.

"Ah!" The human waves its hands and turns red around the edges. "I'm sorry for being so familiar, I don't mean-"

It seems like it won't stop talking if he doesn't stop it, so he stares it down and waits until it takes an awkward, mortified pause for breath. Deliberately slow and careful, he sayd: "Do you know where I can find tea? To buy?"

He specifies because the 'buying' idea is a fairly foreign concept to Tesla.

Hollows don't have their own currency, unless you count blood. There is, technically speaking, trade in Hueco Mundo but usually it is the trade of favours between more powerful hollows and arrancar.

There isn't really much in the way of material goods to exchange.

That's changing now, with the shinigami coming to Hueco Mundo. Aizen is changing the hollows far faster than the natural evolution of an individual allows, and he's bringing things with him - strange, luxury objects, things like cushions and chairs to sit on. There are soft clothes that must be worn, always, for reasons many of them don't quite understand fully - the cloth doesn't feel bad, but it's not warmer than Tesla's own reiatsu, either. The arrancar duly don them and try to make an effort to own them, although they don't really know what they're doing. The shinigami - Ichimaru and Aizen, anyway - look condescendingly at some of them like they're doing it wrong, but they never say why.

The changes are... strange. Tesla finds it strange to be still without resting, to sit and pay attention to words rather than actions. It's all _don't fidget, don't doze, have a little discipline_. There are a lot of new behaviours to think about, and if in the end they fail there's always Ichimaru there to drawl _saa, well, I guess you can't expect more from hollows_ and Aizen to chide him, softly and indulgently, for being unkind.

Tesla isn't sure how much he likes it. He's not stupid enough to bring it up where anyone can hear - except, sometimes, Nnoitra-sama hisses that it's ridiculous, and Tesla feels a bit vindicated.

The human world reminds Tesla of the shinigami: material, busy, complicated in foreign ways. It's exotic, but he already misses home.

Best to focus on the task at hand and leave, then.

"There's a tea shop that way," the human is saying, and rattles off several directions, all quite confusing to Tesla. Tesla measures distance and direction by the moon and his own shadow on the sand. Street names and train station landmarks seem unnecessarily convoluted.

He follows the direction they're pointing in with his gaze. There are buildings in the way - a backlit sign flickering in the dusk, a creaking awning, a neon crab in the window of an eatery - but Tesla can presumably walk around them.

"...Do you want me to show you," says the human and now it is giving him a very dubious look.

"Past the shop with all the glowing lights," he says, feeling stung. "And then east."

"It's an electrical appliance shop," it says slowly. "You know. Televisions and computers and radios? And then left."

From here, left is left, but if Tesla turns, left is right. East is an objectively better measure. But perhaps humans aren't that bright - or maybe they can't feel the incredible, unhappy burn of the sun the way Tesla can, and east means less to them.

Tesla does not reject everything produced by shinigami or humans out of hand, but he does not like the human world.

"Whatever it is," he says, rapidly becoming dismissive in his irritation.

"It... sells televisions, ji-san," says the human. It seems increasingly alarmed

He's not its uncle. But then, Tesla calls Aizen '-sama' even though he's nothing like Nnoitra-sama and Tesla would absolutely eat him if he thought he could get away with it. Perhaps this, too, is politic.

Tesla understands that honorifics have a social function even when you don't mean them. Perhaps especially when you don't mean them.

"Let me take you," says the human. "You're going to walk into traffic or something, I know it."

"No. I won't," Tesla says stiffly.

Ichimaru warned him about breaking the humans' cars right before he left. And... just because Ichimaru was laughing at him doesn't make it necessarily poor advice.

His response seems only to make the human more concerned, which is exactly the opposite of his intention. Then it tugs him by the elbow. Its hands are colder than he is.

This is... strange. It stings his pride to be pulled around. It is galling. However, he gathers that if he lets it the human will bring him to the tea, and then he can just... exchange his money for the tea and go home. It seems easy. He follows.

He knows it would be easier to just take the tea. Humans sleep. Everything sleeps. But for whatever reason of Aizen's convoluted devising, he is to exchange currency for tea. He wonders if he's being tested somehow, and elects not to think about it.

Tesla is guiltily glad Nnoitra-sama isn't here to watch a human tugging him around by the arm though. It's humiliating.

They stop outside the shop with the glowing screens and the human gives him a very dour, offended sort of look and says: "Televisions. You know. TV."

"Yes," Tesla agrees placidly.

It doesn't seem to make the human feel any better. "...You watch it..? Play movies..?" it says, sort of hopefully.

Maybe this isn't going to get him where he needs to be after all. Annoying. "But I can't smell tea?"

The human gives him the strangest look yet. "You're kind of a weird guy, aren't you?"

"No," says Tesla. Nnoitra-sama says he's weird with relative frequency so he's probably lying.

"Hmm. Well. It's this way," it says, and storms off through the crowd. Tesla tugs his arm back - enough of that, he thinks - but he follows easily despite the crowd. As long as he's paying attention it's just like dodging extremely slow, poorly aimed projectiles.

They turn three corners and walk beneath a shadowy underpass before they get to the shop he's looking for. The human points, but Tesla caught the scent from halfway down the street. It is a mix of smokey and bittersweet and grassy things that mixes unpleasantly with the acrid petrol, cigarettes and hot plastic smells.

It still smells better than the surrounding area though. Tesla follows his nose.

"You're welcome," mutters the human behind him somewhere, low enough that he almost misses it. That's a strange thing to say. He ignores it.

There's a bell that clinks overhead when Tesla enters the store and a strange cat figurine waving near the entry. The tea shop is dark and it smells about twelve times better than the outside. There's marginally less noise and the sun is a lesser burn from beneath its roof.

The proprietor is a human (a different one) who seems to be dozing on a stool behind its bench. There's a flimsy paper book on the bench, and a faint wheezing snore coming from the human's face.

That suits Tesla just fine for now, because there are a lot more kinds of tea than he might have expected. The labels are no help. There's white tea, black tea, green tea, post fermented tea, tea with rice, tea with bark, tea with flowers... there are tea types that seem very different depending on what part of the leaf is involved and whether it was grown in full sun or not.

Tesla inhales carefully, trying to track down one he recognises. Surely if it smells the same as something Aizen has had before, it won't be wrong.

He's very sure he doesn't want to be wrong.

His nose is confused by the mix of scents and his eyes are stinging, which isn't helping with the strange thumping of his head in the thin air, but in the end Tesla selects something fancifully called "jade dew" (although it is the colour of neither jade nor dew) and goes to the bench with the dozing proprietor.

The human does not wake.

Tesla coughs.

There's no movement.

After a loooong second, Tesla flares his reiatsu.

It jerks awake, eyes wide, and gasps for breath like it can't breathe. It might not be able to, under the pressure of Tesla's reiatsu. Its eyes bulge at whatever it is feeling.

Heroically, Tesla resists the temptation to let all of his reiatsu unfurl and watch the stupid thing choke.

Instead he wraps the energy tightly around himself, restrained and deceptively small.

"I'd like to buy this tea," he says instead.

The human coughs and sputters, but in the end all it says is, "Excuse me, sorry, so sorry."

Tesla watches blankly.

"Now, you were-?"

"Tea," Tesla repeats, sliding the big wooden canister of it across the bench.

The tea is exchanged for money with remarkably little difficulty. He has no idea if it's expensive or not and he doesn't care.

When Tesla leaves, it's dark and significantly quieter outside. Night here has nothing on the nights in Hueco Mundo but it is still cooler and more familiar. The sun doesn't hurt as much now. The stores with the neon lights are still open - they glow even more luridly in the relative darkness - but many of the others are shut.

Tesla pauses outside the "electrical appliance store". It is dark inside now, except for the unholy glow of the screens. There's still a story playing silently on each one of them. A sign in the window says BUY NOW: 20% OFF.

Casually, and without really contemplating his motives, Tesla raps the glass window smartly with his knuckles. It shatters in a rain of noisy glittering shards.

He takes one home.

* * *

When he first gets back he takes several huge breaths of proper air and shucks his gigai under the moonlight. He carries it back to the laboratory he got it from, shivering with a new sensitivity in the familiar reishi-dense air.

Szayelaporro doesn't deign to acknowledge him at all, except with a sniff when Tesla sets the gigai down in his laboratory. Tesla leaves before this tremendous good luck runs out.

He leaves the television at the door of his own small room in Nnoitra's territory so he doesn't have to explain it to anyone else.

The tea turns out to be more or less what Aizen wants - or so Tesla assumes, because nobody says anything bad about it when he is called upon to report and presents it. There are a few surprised expressions, which is unflattering. Not from Aizen, of course, who doesn't seem to indulge in anything as crass and organic as surprise.

And not from Nnoitra, either, who seems at best bored out of his skull by the meeting, by the talking, by trade and humans and tea. That counts all of the people Tesla cares about.

He is dismissed before the espada are, and he feels Nnoitra's eye following him.

...Despite how ambivalent he feels about opinions other than Nnoitra-sama's, Tesla's still annoyed enough to pause when Loly stops him in a long white corridor to express her sneering surprise that he's able to follow even such simple instructions. "I can't believe Aizen-sama sent somebody like _you_ on an important mission-"

The only reason she does it, he knows, is her belief that he won't retaliate. Tesla's temper is uncommonly slow and restrained for a hollow. He isn't easily riled, which makes him a safe target for Loly's... excess of personality.

Menoly, who has a greater sense of self preservation, is watching him with a quiet and wary air.

Tesla makes an annoyed noise - it escapes him unintentionally, but he still means it - and then turns toward her in the corridor and tilts his head.

"It was just an errand," he says evenly.

"Of course it was," Loly agrees immediately, throwing one pigtail over her shoulder. She's a skinny thing - and not in the way of endless limbs and towering strength. Loly makes him think of birds with their nervous movements and hollow bones. "But that doesn't mean you should expect Aizen-sama to rely upon you in the future. It's not your place to be beside him."

In principle Tesla agrees with that sentiment - his "place" is beside Nnoitra-sama and nowhere else, and the less time he spends running surreal errands for Aizen, the better. The way she says it, however, is galling - like knowing his place, to her, means knowing he is not good enough.

Loly could not be clearer: she thinks Tesla should be lesser in Aizen's convoluted esteem than she is.

He considers eating her. He isn't actually that hungry (although he is always a little bit hungry, because hunger is what hollows are), but he'd like to hurt her. He wouldn't even need to release his zanpakuto. Loly is weak.

Whatever she sees in his facial expression is enough that Menoly catches her partner by the arm and tugs on her. "Loly, enough, come on."

"Hey! Let go of me!"

" _Loly._ "

Now that he's thought about it, the idea seems terribly compelling. He may not even need to draw his zanpakuto. He can just slam his fist into her mask over and over and _over_ , until it chips and cracks and falls away in fragments. He can almost hear her sneering voice gurgling breathlessly beneath her broken face.

Tesla takes two steps forward, staring blankly at the mask fragment around her eye. Yes. He can almost feel her under his hands now. His reiatsu rises all on its own, filling the corridor between them. In the back of his head the word is throbbing, repeating until it's not even words anymore, just a cacophony of _crush, crush, c_ _r_ _ **u s h-**_

"Loly!" says Menoly, at increasing pitch and urgency.

"What's going on?" asks a new voice, low and steady, and it's backed by a wash of icy reiatsu that freezes Tesla in his tracks.

"Nothing," says Menoly quickly, but it's telling that she doesn't take her eyes off Tesla.

He blinks slowly and turns towards Tier Harribel where she stands in the corridor with one hand on the wall. Their meeting must be over.

She is at ease, doesn't even reach for her weapon, but the reiatsu around her is wary.

There is a long, tense pause. "Aa," Tesla says finally, straightening up. He draws his reiatsu in more tightly, shivering as the feeling recedes. There's no need to make such a fuss as all this. "Nothing."

It is against the rules to kill each other in Las Noches, technically. It never seems to stop Nnoitra or Grimmjow much, but there are privileges to being one of the espada.

"Then you can keep going," Harribel says, calm and implacable.

Tesla takes the dismissal as it is given. He walks away from Harribel carefully, one foot in front of the other. He can feel her at his back. It takes an effort not to turn and keep an eye on her, although having an eye on her will not help if she decides to attack.

Tesla almost walks into the television coming in, and he eyes it uncertainly. He doesn't know what possessed him to take it.

He sleeps off his headache from the human world's poor air and pounding sunshine in a pile of blankets that smells of nothing but him and, a little, of Nnoitra. (Alright, not everything from the human world is stupid. Tesla likes blankets. They are warm and soft and their dry thin fibres cling to whatever scent is around them.)

A kick in his side wakes him. "Ne, Tesla."

Tesla flinches and cracks open his eye. The light is wrong, so all he sees is a towering silhouette with a huge circular shape on top. It smells familiar though. Nnoitra is even taller when Tesla is horizontal, and he is a particular expert at looming.

"The hell is this thing doing here?"

Tesla looks at the television. Its screen is dark, but it's still in one piece. "I found it in the human world," he says.

He rolls away and gets to his feet fluidly, shaking off the confusion of sleep. He can feel his hair doing something weird and he pats it uncertainly. Nnoitra is eyeing the television and not Tesla.

"More human shit, fine. Why's it _here_?"

A good question. Tesla finds it unaccountably hard to answer. Finally he says, "If you dislike it, I will get rid of it immediately."

That's clearly not the response Nnoitra is looking for. "What do you want more human stuff for?"

Some of the espada, like Starrk and Harribel, restrain their reiatsu when they deal with lesser hollows. Nnoitra isn't one of them. Standing steady beneath the full pressure of Nnoitra's reiatsu with all the weight of his attention upon him is a little bit like staring into the sun.

"It lights up. Tells stories." He realises how frivolous and stupid that must seem, and a part of him wants to curl back up and put the blankets over his head. The human world clearly made him loopy. "...It seemed interesting at the time."

He's not quite sure if he should apologise or not.

"...A toy." There is an incredulous pause. "What kind of..." Nnoitra grunts to himself, which could mean anything, trails off, and turns back to Tesla. "A toy?"

Nnoitra frowns, wide mouth tugged down, eye narrowed upon Tesla's face in the dim lighting.

It is, isn't it? Tesla went to the human world and brought back a toy. That sounds stupid. He feels kind of stupid.

Nnoitra-sama is asking him a question, so Tesla answers even though it's kind of humiliating. "Yes," he says.

"I sure have a strange damn fraccion," mutters Nnoitra. "Whatever. Keep it, I don't care."

...Really?

" _Don't_ start acting weird about it," he adds severely, scowling harder.

Tesla agrees. He's still in two minds about the thing himself.

Thirty seconds later, Nnoitra drags Tesla out for training. He's as relentless in his efforts as ever, so they don't return until hours later. By then, Tesla is bleeding in six places and ready to drop. His snapped clavicle will take at least the next several hours to heal, and he still has to find someone to eat if he wants to recover. He should have eaten Loly when he had the chance.

Nnoitra will leave him behind if he isn't fully recovered, and he'll probably yell at him for remaining injured, too.

Tesla puts it off for several long minutes but in the end he levers himself up. There are things more important than his comfort. He needs the food. Maybe just a gillian...

He doesn't even really think about the television again for days.

* * *

next up: tesla hooks up his television, what an adventure


	2. Chapter 2

The television remains in Tesla's space. He keeps it out of Nnoitra's way, of course - for one, Tesla is firmly against getting in Nnoitra's way, and, two, things in Nnoitra's way always get broken sooner or later. Keeping the unwieldy thing out of Nnoitra's casual influence puts it firmly into the tiny spaces that are Tesla's, however. He stumbles over it roughly once every two days (literally, on days when training runs long and Nnoitra is 'restive'), so he can't forget about it for long.

Eventually he has the time and energy and patience to experiment with it. He's not so clueless about how to make it work - he understands it must run on electricity.

There's plenty of stuff in Las Noches that needs electricity now, since the shinigami keep their human foods cold and require heating and filtering and other things hollows don't traditionally bother with. Szayel is almost certainly the person who made the generators - taking energy, somehow, from the winds whipping across the dunes and turning it into something usable - but Szayel is uninterested in monitoring whatever use they're put to.

Tesla gets the electricity for his television without having to consult anybody at all, and from there it's pretty intuitive. He gathers that the screen is meant to receive signals from the contents of the attached box, which somehow reads records printed onto various mediums.

He has exactly one of those, and rapidly recognises that he's going to need more, because the one that's in the box from when he got it is...

"Is this about pigs?" says Nnoitra, making Tesla jump.

The eerie light of the screen pours right across Tesla, and he can't see Nnoitra's shadow - and his reiatsu saturates everything so thoroughly when he's nearby that it's hard to sense his approach unless Tesla is paying attention or Nnoitra is especially focused.

Now Tesla jumps and spins around and finds Nnoitra leaning against the wall right behind where he's sitting on the floor with his blanket.

Technically, the story is about a short pink pig and a bunch of sheep and some dogs. Who talk to each other. The sheep need herding for some reason.

It's... very surreal.

"It's what was in there when I got it," says Tesla defensively.

Nnoitra's eye narrows on Tesla, and his mouth stretches in a wide gleaming smile, all flat smooth teeth across his narrow face. Their shadows are huge, cast monstrously against the pale wall by the bright light of the screen.

"Only an idiot would waste his time with something like this, Tesla."

Tesla kind of agrees with him. This is definitely not what he considers quality entertainment.

"Human humour appears to be... somewhat odd," Tesla admits. "...did you need me to do something for you, Nnoitra-sama?"

Nnoitra doesn't answer - he makes a disgusted noise and crosses his arms and does not leave, which Tesla supposes is an answer in itself.

The pig wins in the end. If one considers successfully gaining the approval of a bunch of humans to be winning. (On the other hand, nobody eats the pig. Not being eaten is, from Tesla's perspective, at least a small victory.)

There are singing mice.

"That was stupid," Nnoitra says, when the bewildering story is over.

"I wonder if they make anything less..." Tesla trails off, uncertain as to how to characterise what they've just viewed.

"Stupid," Nnoitra supplies. Then, strangely, he adds: "You should go to the human world and find out."

Tesla blinks, and swivels his head to look at him. "... Nnoitra-sama?"

"What?" barks Nnoitra, hot and defensive. His eye narrows to a slit, glittering brightly in the light of the screen.

Tesla smothers his smile like his life depends upon it because - well, for one, because it does.

But mostly, Nnoitra will interpret a smile right now as being laughed at. Tesla doesn't _precisely_ presume to think that his own opinion could hurt Nnoitra's feelings, exactly. But it is nonetheless important to him not to risk it.

He wants to smile a little, though. There are very few things in the world that Nnoitra likes. A hollow's existence is suffering, but Nnoitra... sometimes takes it to extremes. If there's a chance this is something he might be able to like, Tesla will definitely find out how.

Perhaps not surrealist stories about talking farm animals, though.

He gives him a face of blankest neutrality. "I'll have a look," he says, although he knows he'll do a lot more than go looking.

There is another week of training and strange missions from Aizen, which are either relevant to some mysterious endgame nobody else quite understands or purely for the amusement of the shinigami - which, Tesla isn't quite sure. It's punctuated by a trip in which Nnoitra travels halfway across the desert on a rumour to find a natural Vasto Lorde.

In the end it isn't a Vasto Lorde at all, and Nnoitra's disappointment is only matched by his vast and bitter resentment.

The hollow is a powerful spider adjuchas. It has eight long, armoured legs, a great many red eyes set deep in its mask and venom that sears into the sand and leaves it coagulated in steaming glossy clumps. Such a creature would threaten many of the arrancar.

Nnoitra doesn't need to release his zanpakuto to defeat it.

The adjuchas occupies Nnoitra's attention for some time, although strictly speaking it isn't much of a fight. Coming so far only to be deprived of the fight he wants puts him in a furious temper - partially, Tesla suspects, at himself for getting his hopes up.

He wants to tell him it's okay. It's okay to be excited, even if the thing anticipated falls through. It's not meant to be a humiliating vulnerability. It's not something to be so angry with himself about.

On the other hand, Tesla likes breathing and prefers to do it with his mouth than through a hole in his neck. He says nothing. Nnoitra puts on a fantastic show in his anger, anyway.

There's a fierceness and a rage in him that's somehow mesmerising to Tesla. Nnoitra's reiatsu is enormous and terrible, stinging Tesla's skin, and so crushing it's hard to breathe through the pressure of it. He is a bleak, alien, beautiful thing.

The adjuchas never even pierces his hierro.

"I'm bored," Nnoitra says sourly, when the adjuchas is six legs down, bleeding like a stuck pig and howling hoarsely in fear and pain.

Nnoitra is sticky with blood and venom, teeth bared, jaw clenched, eye wild and unfocused. His chest is heaving more with the force of his feelings than with any exertion from the fight.

Just the sight of him like this wakes something aching and restless in Tesla. He licks his lips and tries not to be obvious.

"Tesla," he says, and Tesla's attention snaps right to his mouth. He feels electrified, alert, on point.

"Yes?"

"-just, do what you want with it."

And Nnoitra stalks away, stray flickers of reiatsu snapping along the sand underfoot.

Tesla isn't one for hours of torment. That's not because he's merciful or gentle, it's just that once he gets violent he loses himself to it. It overwhelms his senses and his impulse control goes up in smoke, so it's very hard to hold back. But he does find a lot of satisfaction in brutality. And he also finds it's easy to turn one aching, restless hunger into another.

Tesla starts eating before the adjuchas is dead. The screams don't really bother him. One of its legs twitches where it lays discarded in the pale sand.

It's a better meal than Tesla would have caught on his own. It only makes it better that he suspects that Nnoitra knows it.

In the end, he makes time to go looking in the human world in the hopes of finding something novel enough to distract Nnoitra from whatever goes on inside his head.

He rips open a tiny garganta and slips through without anyone the wiser. Tesla has no currency of his own and no gigai in any case, so he ignores the strange air and the vile beating of the sun and simply follows a human through the door of a business advertising the human audiovisual stories.

It smells dusty and strange inside, and there's a great deal of noise - speakers mounted overhead play thumping music with a woman's breathy voice. If he listens, she seems to be singing something about grinding on her. This leaves Tesla with a very perplexed feeling.

Maybe it will be harder than he thinks to find anything humans produce that isn't... strange.

On the other hand, hollows are beings made from the stuff of human souls. Sure, they're comprised almost entirely of those who don't naturally pass from the human world - souls lost, relentless hunger and suffering - but these also must be facets that exist in the living. Surely there must be something a little bit relatable in here. "More relatable than talking farm animals" cannot be so high a bar.

The first thing he realises is that humans must really, _really_ like love stories. There are a great many films with humans on them in quirky positions holding odd props and featuring stylised hearts (which Tesla thinks don't look very much like hearts at all), and at least one pink-coloured box with a red ribbon around it filled with similar cases.

He's not sure if that's more or less relatable to a hollow than talking sheep, but he is confident that none of those will hold his attention - and Nnoitra might just break the whole television. Feeling a little discouraged, Tesla moves on.

He spies a "recommended" shelf, which seems possibly of interest.

He skims through blurbs and cases without stopping. There are fewer love stories here, and Tesla is surprised to find that the humans have an interest in nonhumans. He passes over a story about a band of mixed humans and nonhumans on a long quest to save the world from evil and pauses uncertainly at one about a man hunting enslaved artificial humans who have stolen from their creators in space somehow. He considers. That might be okay... for him, anyway, but he thinks Nnoitra won't be compelled by this kind of story.

He keeps looking.

The comedies are... bizarre. Surreal. No.

He keeps moving, shifting out of the way of a grey-haired woman in a floral dress when she nearly walks through him. Part of him is annoyed that he must be the one to move when she is so much weaker. Tesla knows intellectually that she can't see him or sense him. She cannot possibly know the danger he poses to her. His instincts say her utter unconcern is arrogant, but instincts don't really understand context. He shakes it off.

There is a dingy shelf of films right at the back of the store that all seem to be about humans having sex - he can literally smell the change in the human scents right in front of the shelves, a bittersweet organic reek that the humans probably can't smell for themselves. It's a little nauseating.

Humans aren't very sexually interesting to Tesla - a person doesn't feel real unless he can feel the pressure of their reiatsu, so at best they're a kind of low-nutient snackfood to him - but these "xxx films" might actually have more comedy value than the surreal mess in the comedy shelf. A lot of them seem to centre on abusing women, too, which he figures Nnoitra will get a kick out of.

He skims through the titles until he finds one with a young blindfolded woman passively mouthing a knife on its cover. Tesla's eye is drawn to the wet shine of her lip against the edge of the blade. It has "BANNED in 22 countries!" written on it like a badge of honour.

Tesla supposes that's as good a recommendation as any. He takes it. It disappears from human view when he slides it into his coat, but the transition still makes a man six feet away twitch and jump. Tesla ignores him.

That seems like a solid choice, but there's not much else. It takes Tesla another five minutes of wandering in increasing frustration before his eyes finally land upon the shelf labelled "horror", and he doesn't even have to examine the films to know this is where he should be looking - for humans, hollows already _are_ horror.

Tesla's gaze drifts from box to box. Lots of red smears and dramatic silhouettes. It's almost homey in that way.

He picks several more or less at random: one with a cover that's just a razorblade held up to a bloodshot eye, another with a bloody hand print, something with a picture of a girl washed in bright red - red seems to be the theme with these films, presumably because humans find blood inherently horrifying. That seems like it should be awkward for them, since they're filled with the stuff...

Tesla is surprised but pleased to find a whole stack of films dedicated to the hungry dead. They don't really _look_ like hollows, but the general idea of "dead" and "mindless hunger" is a familiar one. The films are clearly metaphorically and thematically about creatures just like him. Looking at their covers, he can see that they aren't very sympathetic to hollows. That doesn't concern him much. Hollows aren't that deserving of sympathy - Tesla isn't even very sympathetic toward hollows and he is one.

He has a whole pile now, enough that some human will probably catch a glimpse of a floating box when he leaves. He contemplates that for a moment but it's really not his problem. He doesn't care if a few humans learn that a hollow is nearby and work themselves into a panic.

Tesla hears one woman swear loudly as he's leaving and knows he has indeed been noticed. He slips through a garganta before anybody even has time to start yelling.

The dark and cold of Hueco Mundo is a relief, even after such a short time in the human world. Tesla has only very hazy memories of being a weaker hollow - anything before he turned from a gillian into an adjuchas is sort of soft-focus and fragmented - but he thinks it must have been a lot harder, back then, to hunt humans in their own world full of noise and light.

Of course, now that Tesla's better fit for it, he doesn't really need to do it at all. Sometimes that's the way of things.

He returns to Las Noches to find the espada all in a meeting with their shinigami masters again, locked behind a set of tall white double doors at the end of a long and equally white corridor. Occasionally Tesla wonders what happened to the numeros who built all these huge bleached spaces. He suspects they were Szayelaporro's earliest efforts to turn gillian into useful arrancar, and that they have long since been consumed.

The tres bestias are hovering anxiously near the doors. Tesla smells them before he sees them, and it is almost a relief to finally spot Mila-Rose's wealth of tangled brown hair there and be reminded that not everything is stark and white and endless. There is still colour somewhere in the world.

He can't see them directly, but Tesla can also feel Shawlong and Nakeem somewhere around and, if he concentrates, Edrad. Di Roy he suspects is hidden to his senses somewhere beneath their greater powers. Yylfortd isn't with them at all - avoiding Szayelaporro, probably. This, Tesla assumes, is Grimmjow's fraccion doing a poor job of pretending they aren't hovering just as eagerly as Harribel's.

There's silence when he approaches the doors, although only Appaci glowers at him reflexively.

"You," she mutters.

Tesla elects to ignore her rudeness. It's not Tesla that upsets her, anyway.  
She's scared of what - who - might follow... which is just good sense. It would be exactly like Nnoitra to kill somebody else's fraccion out of spite for their leader.

"Sung-Sun, Mila-Rose." He pauses. "Apacci." Apacci bares her teeth at him. "Do you know how long they've been in there?"

"We don't have to tell you anything," says Apacci, narrowing her mismatched eyes at him. So hostile.

"He didn't say we had to tell him, he just asked."

She turns on Mila-Rose with exactly the same glare she gave Tesla. "If he wanted to know he should have been here when they were summoned-"

So there is an argument, immediately, about what they should tell him, if anything, and Tesla is left forced to either intervene or pretend it's totally normal for them to hiss about him like he's not even there.

Harribel must be a very patient master, Tesla thinks. If Tesla behaved like this, Nnoitra would be picking him out of his teeth and complaining that the fight wasn't challenging enough.

(And lonely, Tesla thinks, feeling suddenly a little uncomfortable. He would be lonely, too.

Tesla regards it as in everybody's best interests if he continues not being completely intolerable to his master.)

The argument is ongoing, with Apacci growing louder and Mila-Rose more annoyed by the moment.

Tesla wonders if it might not be easier to just play the dangerous game of asking Nnoitra about the meeting once he emerges. The only problem with that plan is that it may take six or seven questions to reach the end of Nnoitra's patience - or it may take one. Sometimes less.

"There's something happening in the human world," says Sung-Sun, who has ignored the other two for the duration of the bickering. She raises a sleeved hand to her mouth. "I think they've been talking about who should go to scout. It's been almost an hour."

An hour. That's a long time. To send a member of the espada to the human world... Tesla knows who he wouldn't send, but who he _would_ send is a harder question. He doubts anybody is silly enough to send Nnoitra, though, and wonders why his presence is so necessary to that decision.

There is a wild, angry flare of reiatsu from behind the doors and Apacci twitches away from it. That would be Grimmjow losing his temper, Tesla thinks. Again.

The others look like they have settled in to wait the espada out. Tesla doesn't believe Nnoitra needs him to be waiting right here when they're finished, and he also has no interest in listening to the tres bestias bicker for the duration.

He does have other things to do, anyway. Laundry, for one. Their uniforms are all white, and hollows are a messy, bloody people.

He nods to Sung-Sun before leaving.

Somehow it is still hours and hours before Nnoitra emerges. By that time Tesla has cleaned as many things as he's willing to clean unless specifically asked by somebody who can force him - which is exactly as many things as are necessary for their immediate comfort. He's sitting cross-legged on the floor of his tiny room in Nnoitra's palace, ignoring the blindingly white walls and contemplating which of the stories he wants to try out.

Tesla hears him come in - he can't smell him, because everything here smells a little like Nnoitra, and he can't feel him because the place is soaked in Nnoitra's reiatsu to begin with. But there's the distinctive click-click of low-heeled shoes, the clatter of Santa Teresa's chain smacking into a wall.

Tesla pauses to concentrate. Sometimes the meetings wind Nnoitra up and nothing will satisfy but to go kill something (or many somethings) immediately, and sometimes they sap all of his energy. There's no way to predict the outcome.

He hears the boots slow and then stop, the clink of chain, the scrape of metal. Then nothing.

He hesitates for a second.

Tesla's sole ambition is to help Nnoitra destroy all those who stand in his way, of course. But he elects, often, to expand the boundaries of that duty to include the care of him in a more general sense. There is no conflict for Tesla between wanting Nnoitra to be well and destroying any shield so shamefully presumptuous as to block his blade.

Sometimes, though, the biggest obstacle to any kind of intervention is Nnoitra himself.

Tesla knows that Nnoitra can spend an incredibly long time sitting still and doing absolutely nothing, only to blur into sudden violence when provoked.

"Stop it," he hears him mutter in the other room, and Tesla isn't sure whether he's talking to himself or to Tesla somehow - but either way he does not want to be caught listening. Hurriedly, he takes the first disc he lays hands on and jams it into the slot beneath the screen.

It plays automatically, and at the same low volume he had the device set the last time.

He listens out for Nnoitra, but there's no further sounds, just the dampened reiatsu he associates with long periods of still and unblinking inactivity on Nnoitra's behalf.

The images on screen distract him after a few long minutes anyway, although they're more puzzling than interesting - despite Tesla's belief that the story is meant to be sort of vaguely horror themed, by the time he pays attention it's actually showing two humans having sex. Not very graphic sex, although it's definitely what they're doing.

He peers at the box, reassures himself it's meant to be about hollows - well, sort of - and then continues watching with puzzled patience.

Humans, he decides uncertainly, just like to think about fucking.

That's fine, and makes sense - most hollows do too. But it seems like humans are in a much better position for indiscriminate sex, because there's no risk of being eaten in a vulnerable moment.

It's a little bit difficult to get used to interpreting the movements on screen as belonging to characters who are meant to be alive. They move and talk, but of course none of them gives off any reiatsu at all. Tesla can watch one of Szayel's surveillance tapes and intellectually understand what's going on, but it's a different skill - the humans in the story are supposed to evoke feelings, although Tesla struggles to figure out which feelings exactly.

"Just shoot them in the head," a human is saying to another human on screen. The trouble with humans is that they all look pretty similar without any smells or reiatsu to tell them apart.

The first character was a woman. This one isn't now. At least the women wear different hair. That makes them a lot easier to tell apart...

He thinks it's an entirely new character talking right now. He's wearing a different costume anyway. "They seem to go down permanently when you shoot them in the head," the image declares, "you gotta burn them."

That's actually pretty good advice for killing anything dead and hungry: break its mask and, if that doesn't work, burn it to ash. It's a good rule of thumb, although there are exceptions - nobody's yet figured out how to kill Szayel permanently, for example. If they had, he'd be dead several times over by now. But Tesla's still surprised to see the story provide such high quality general information.

Perhaps the film is intended to be educational as well as entertaining?

It progresses, and Tesla finds himself semi-voluntarily caught up in the story. There are too many characters and it's hard to tell them apart, but the hollows are easily recognisable at least - they are "dead" humans, dressed up and painted, and the narrative stresses over and over that they eat each other.

The human heroes team up with each other and band together in an abandoned building full of goods, and their relationships with one another rapidly disintegrate under the relative pressure of being trapped in a world overrun with hollows.

Part of the problem with this depiction is that there seem to be neither menos nor shinigami, nor any way for the dead to pass on - so of course the human world would be overrun.

"Hell is overflowing," bellows one character, some nameless man who nonetheless talks with authority. Tesla isn't sure where hell comes into it - the dead in hell are a lot worse than the mindless hunger of unevolved hollows. Tesla isn't sure about his current existence but he knows he would not trade it in for hell. "-because you have sex out of wedlock. You kill unborn children. You have _man-on-man relations_!"

There's got to be some context for this, but Tesla's not sure what. Do humans actually think _sex_ causes hollows?

The other obvious problem they have is that the humans don't quite bond properly. Even an adjuchas pack will submit to one leader - eventually - but the humans in this story don't even know how to do that much.

This time Tesla is angled slightly toward the entryway to his little room, so he does see Nnoitra's approach. The light from the screen catches the bright gleam of Santa Teresa's blade and throws a giant circular shadow of it on the wall.

Tesla feels a twitch of anxiety at the sight, but in the end Nnoitra is just carrying it. Santa Teresa's shape doesn't lend itself to being sheathed.

"Nnoitra-sama."

"...The fuck are you doing," Nnoitra says by way of greeting, eyeing Tesla.

Tesla wonders if he looks strange here, planted before the television and wreathed in its odd light. He is settled upon the floor inside two blankets, because blankets are one of the few completely good things the shinigami have brought with them and Hueco Mundo is cold.

"Just - watching this," Tesla says carefully. "Your meeting ran long."

"Are you trying to say I'm late?" Nnoitra wonders, baring his teeth in a way that means absolutely nothing good. His long pale fingers twist on Santa Teresa's haft. "I don't answer to you."

So it's going to be like this today, is it?

"Of course not, Nnoitra-sama," he murmurs, although he can't really help it if his eye lingers warily on the enormous curved blade of Nnoitra's zanpakuto.

"What is this shit?" Nnoitra asks finally, jerking his chin toward the screen.

Tesla blinks back to it, and finds that during his distraction the scene has changed.

"Ah... This character is gestating a human. Her mate has her tied to the bed there, I think because he wants her to give birth before they kill her."

"...huh," says Nnoitra slowly, like he never expected humans to come up with such a reasonable idea. He inches closer and Tesla pretends not to notice. He'd like to move over and offer up his blankets - he would like to share anything of his own with Nnoitra - but he knows that if he's too obvious Nnoitra will reject the offer and stalk out in a temper. It's better to go slowly and let Nnoitra come closer on his own, if he decides he wants to.

In this scene of the movie it is clear the character has already become one of the not-quite-hollow monsters even as she gives birth.

Tesla's prediction turns out to be incorrect - the first character to stumble across them kills the monster tied to the bed, but it eventuates that the male character does not want to kill her, after all. There's a lot of banging and some blood.

"Unrealistic," Nnoitra complains, but Tesla notices he has crept even closer. "And _stupid_. What use is she going to be like that anyway?"

By the end of the scene the man, woman, monster baby and one bystander are all dead. Nnoitra starts laughing and can't seem to stop. He sounds a little like a broken hinge. Tesla doesn't mind, Nnoitra laughing is one of his favourite sounds - sometimes it's because something's funny and sometimes it's because he's knee-deep in blood and having a good time, but it's always a good sound. That blank mood is already lifting.

"What the fuck is this, this is so stupid," Nnoitra says giddily, finally edging close enough that Tesla can chance sort of casually shifting and leaving part of his blanket free. He watches out of the corner of his eye and pretends fiercely that he's fixed on the screen.

"It's about several humans trapped in a mall, because they're surrounded by hollows and don't want to be eaten," Tesla tells him.

"Hollows?" Nnoitra repeats dubiously, which is all the opening Tesla needs to explain the whole 'dead monster, mindless hunger' part. Nnoitra catches on very quickly because there is, honestly, not much to catch on to.

"Their group behaviour is shameful," Tesla points out, because it's something that's been nagging at him. "A group of hollows would have a leader by now."

"Kind of hard to tell who's the strongest outta a bunch of humans. They're all so weak there's no point in arguing about it."

Well, that's true, in a way. And it would be hard to pick a leader without a fight. Tesla hesitates. "Do you want me to turn it off?" he finally asks.

"Nah," says Nnoitra, which makes Tesla feel a little like his chest is filled with helium.

On the screen, a dog is sent to deliver a food package to a stranded ally across a sea of monsters. Tesla could have told them that was a terrible idea from its inception. The ally dies, and, predictably, one of the humans characters has a fit of sentiment and goes after the dog.

"Of course it'd be the woman," Nnoitra scoffs.

Tesla tilts his head, thinking. Harribel would definitely do that for one of her fraccion, although Harribel would also certainly win. He can't say he thinks Cirucci or any of the other female arrancar he knows would be moved by any such protective urge. He hasn't forgotten the ridiculous scene with the man trying to avenge his zombie girlfriend, either.

"They all have no discipline or impulse control," Tesla says, although he's careful not to actually contradict Nnoitra. Very little is worth that kind of fight, especially when there's always a chance he won't survive the beating Nnoitra lays out. "And they are all prone to fits of absurd sentiment."

Nnoitra grunts and his eye gets distant for a second. "Sounds like Grimmjow," he mutters.

Tesla remembers the wild flaring reiatsu in the meeting earlier.

"We felt that outside, too," he says.

Nnoitra makes an annoyed noise, and he keeps talking even though his eye doesn't stray from the screen. "He's throwing a tantrum because Aizen says he's too 'unstable' to do some shitty job in the human world. Ulquiorra's going instead."

That's all Tesla gets from that, but it's still plenty of information. It gels with what Sung-Sun said earlier, too, and explains why Nnoitra is so low energy from the meeting - hours and hours just to determine something like that. Tesla's glad he's not an espada in this case, although he can't help a little flutter of annoyance that Aizen would waste Nnoitra's time like that.

Nnoitra repeats his assessment that the whole thing is incredibly stupid six or seven times, but tellingly, he's still there when the credits begin rolling. The very end of the film, when the surviving humans reach the shore of a new island only to be ambushed by a veritable hoard of monsters who then lunge toward the camera, makes him laugh again.

Tesla stops watching the film to watch the light on Nnoitra's face.

The story on screen _is_ stupid and unrealistic. And it doesn't change anything about their situation or the fundamental unfairness of their world. It doesn't stop the shinigami with their condescending smiles and baffling plans, either.

But... it's still good to see Nnoitra genuinely amused sometimes, and that's worth something to Tesla. Even if it is just because of a silly story about humans being eaten by monsters.

"That was a huge waste of time," says Nnoitra.

"Yes," Tesla agrees, because it definitely was. Perhaps even as much of a waste of time as Nnoitra sitting still and staring at nothing for hours. Then he adds: "There are others."

He can almost see the thought flicker behind Nnoitra's eye, but it's fleeting. "No."

Disappointing. Perhaps later Tesla will convince him again somehow.

"There's supposed to be an adjuchas colony if we go south far enough. Nothing worth fighting, but I'm hungry."

Tesla is pretty much always hungry. He turns the television off and they hit the sand at a slow run.


End file.
